


Dust and Wonders

by Lomonaaeren



Series: From Samhain to the Solstice [14]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amoral Harry, Dark Harry, Gen, Horcruxes, Necromancer Harry Potter, Necromancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-26 06:43:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16676536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Harry meets a wizard who calls himself Aeron Luthan. Except Aeron isn’t really a wizard, he’s a necromancer, and he alters the course of Harry’s entire life.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics, for the following prompt by LoveThyFrenemies: _Necromancer Harry. Young Harry runs into this old, homeless wizard who teachers him art of necromancy, so he doesn't go to Hogwarts. He learns how to summon dead people like his parents and grandparents, terrorize his abusive relatives, and learn secrets that no living people know. He later learns to manipulate Horcruxes as well to enslave Voldemort's soul forever_. This is the first part, with a second to be posted tomorrow.

****“What are you staring at, boy?”

Harry had spent the morning running away from Dudley and Piers, again. He was winded and streets and streets away from Privet Drive. He was hot and sweating and only wanted a drink of water.

That was maybe the reason that he answered as he did. “You.”

The man was sitting against the brick wall of an alley, wrapped in so many scarves and rags and tattered scraps that Harry thought he must be a vampire or something. No one else could be _cold_ on a day like this. All Harry could see of him was long, tangled brown hair with streaks of grey in it and a pair of eyes that glittered haughtily at him when the man spoke.

Not that that was anything new for Harry. People looked at him haughtily all the time, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and the neighbors and the primary school teachers who believed Dudley over him. Harry just glanced at the man again and then kept walking. It didn’t seem likely that someone homeless would be able to give him water or money to buy it.

Except somehow the man was in front of him, and he was bigger and taller than Harry had thought. Harry stepped back, keeping a wary eye on his fists. He had long fingernails smeared with grime. They would _hurt_ if he scratched Harry.

The man cleared his throat with a sound like a tiger spitting, and said, “Name’s Aeron Luthan.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Not you, boy. _Me_.”

Harry nodded, still keeping a wary eye on the man’s hands. Aeron sighed as though he despaired of him. “And what’s _your_ name, boy? It’s traditional to reply with that.”

“Harry Potter.” With Harry’s luck, the man would have heard of him, and heard what the Dursleys were saying about him, and he wouldn’t want to associate with him any more after that.

“Harry Pot—” Aeron stared at him as if he _had_ heard of him, but to Harry’s confusion, he just looked surprised, not suspicious. Then he said, “Well, boy, let’s see if you have the scar.” And he gestured, and for some reason a cool breeze brushed against Harry’s forehead, and Aeron was staring at the lightning bolt scar that always sat there.

Harry jerked away and flattened down his fringe over the scar again, staring warily at Aeron. Aunt Petunia was always on about how he shouldn’t show it to people, it was ugly and no one wanted to see _that_.

“Well, well,” Aeron murmured. “And in the Muggle world, too!”

“What’s a Muggle?”

Aeron turned his head back and forth in a way that made him look mental. Harry was already bracing himself to run when Aeron breathed, “Can it be? Harry Potter, utterly ignorant of his heritage, and mine to shape?”

Harry didn’t like that “mine to shape” part, and he didn’t know what Aeron was talking about for the rest of it. He really was going to run, the minute Aeron started muttering or raving to himself the way homeless people did, and looked away. But instead, Aeron took a step forwards and knelt down in front of him. Harry started. Now he could see the man was wearing a collection of dark scraps that all fluttered around something that looked like a dress. Did men wear dresses?

“I can give you power,” whispered Aeron. “I can teach you to use your magic, to summon the dead, to terrify your enemies. You are a wizard. The strange things that you must have noticed you can do on occasion? They are magic. But my branch of magic is much darker and more powerful than the one you might call your own if I left you as you are.”

Harry thought he understood only about half of that, but he was intrigued enough to demand, “Why would you do that, though? No one would do that for me without wanting something in return.”

Aeron smiled, and his eyes glittered again. “You are famous among wizards. Your kind’s world has outlawed my magic. I’d like to raise and train someone who would be loyal to _my_ magic, and someone who could have the power to change wizards’ minds and hearts to favor it.”

“I’m—just Harry. Not famous.”

“I will tell you the truth. I will show you how to manipulate others. Are you interested?”

“But how do you know that you’re not mistaking me for someone who’s _really_ famous?” Harry wanted this to be real, but more than that, he wanted to know if it wasn’t. He couldn’t bear for the offer of teaching and _real_ magic to be given and then taken away again, the way the Dursleys were always taking away the holidays and the gifts they promised him if he just did a little better.

Aeron reached out and laid a hand on his forehead. Harry gasped as a sharp spark traveled down from the scar to his arm, and Aeron stared at him.

“No one else has that scar,” he whispered, “and the name, and the power. There is something of the dead in that scar, Potter. Something that I can teach you how to use for your own benefit, but only _I_ can. Those wizards whose blood you bear would only teach you to be afraid of it.”

Harry swallowed. “I’m tired of being afraid.” And it was true. He didn’t want to run away from Dudley and Piers anymore. He didn’t want to cower in front of Uncle Vernon or watch Aunt Petunia warily because he was waiting for her to scream at him.

“You would learn fear as respect if I taught you.” Aeron was leaning back in a really weird-looking uncomfortable position, but his eyes were shining and so was his face. “You would learn to fear the dead and the power you worked with, true. They might escape your control at any moment if you did not. But you would have that power.”

“Could I—I mean, wizards have to be hiding, right? Since no knows about them? So _could_ I use that power on my family? Would someone come arrest me or something?”

Aeron gave a deep chuckle that made Harry start, but he relaxed a little when he realized the man was beaming at him, not angry. “There are indeed laws against the use of magic on Muggles. But not the power I will teach you. The Ministry can’t sense it. Their magic can’t track it. And it’s already illegal simply to _know,_ so there aren’t separate laws about using it on Muggles.”

Harry hesitated a long moment. In some ways, he didn’t think that he wanted to learn this. He tried to obey the law and be a good person, partially because he didn’t think the Dursleys were. He knew this was going to change everything if he learned it. He would never really be able to go back and obey the law again.

But he wanted them to fear him.

“Okay,” he told Aeron, and endured the man cackling and grabbing onto him like he was one of Dudley’s plushes or something.

*

Harry stepped out of his cupboard, heart pounding, when Aunt Petunia yelled for him to make dinner. He knew that he had to do this. Aeron had been uncompromising. He wasn’t going to keep teaching Harry if Harry didn’t do this.

And it would make him feel better after the day he’d had, when Dudley had chased him and Aunt Petunia had swung _another_ frying pan at his head.

It was still frightening.

“What are you doing, you lazy boy? Get in the kitchen right now—”

Aunt Petunia turned around and gasped when she saw he was already standing there. That made Harry feel stronger. She was _afraid_ of him. He smiled at her and spread his hands out in front of him, the way Aeron had taught him.

“What are you doing? What kind of freakish—”

Harry closed his eyes, and the names were in his thoughts as if they’d always been there, even though he had never heard Aunt Petunia tell him the names of his grandparents. “Richard, Elise,” he whispered. “Come to me. Hear me. Join me and your daughter.”

The air darkened and swirled behind him. Harry knew that even though his eyes weren’t open to see it. And he heard Aunt Petunia scream, and there was no sweeter sound.

He looked up and saw the ghosts standing in front of him. The man was naked, except for clumps of grave dirt where his eyes and mouth should be. The woman was more like a ghost, wrapped in a tattered dress, her mouth open in what looked like a silent scream.

Aeron was right. Harry _did_ fear them, especially their hatred. He could feel that pressing against his skin even more strongly than he felt the cold. They would love to break free of his control and rend him.

But Harry stepped forwards, and Aunt Petunia was the one who cowered and put her hands over her ears as though that would somehow block out the low chant that had begun to emerge from her parents’ mouths. “Petunia. Petunia. Petunia.”

“You have to treat me better,” Harry said, waiting until she looked at him with glazed eyes. Harry knew _he’d_ looked like that, in the past. It was so satisfying not to, now. “Or I’ll give you to them.”

Aeron had told him to keep his threats simple, that those worked best. It really did seem as if that was the case when Aunt Petunia gasped and shrank away, her hands over her eyes. “Yes. Yes. I’ll talk to Vernon. I’ll talk to Dudley. I’ll make sure that you have Dudley’s second bedroom. Just—please make them go _away_!” Her voice built up into a shriek as Richard reached out to touch her arm with a heavy, cold hand.

Harry turned and focused his will on his grandparents. Aeron had taught him how to feel the cold currents flowing through the world, and how to bend them so that they snatched the dead and brought them or sent them away again. “Go back now.”

A wordless voice howled from Elise’s direction. His grandfather stepped closer. They wanted to eat him.

 _They are only the dead,_ Aeron’s voice said in his mind. _You are the living. You are the necromancer. You are their master._

Harry took a deep breath. Yes, he was. And he was the one who was going to make them back away.

“Go back!”

The world changed as though Harry was caught in a mighty tide. Then the air cleared, and there was no trace of his grandparents. Aunt Petunia stood up slowly, staring around.

“You never know,” Harry said softly. “They might come back.”

Aunt Petunia immediately went to call Uncle Vernon. Harry leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Aeron had warned him the magic would be draining.

But he’d done it. He’d _done_ it. He was free, and powerful.

No one was ever going to bully him again.

*

Harry stared at the letter in his hands. It had actually been delivered while he was with Aeron, which was something he had wanted to happen, but hadn’t thought actually would. He held it out wordlessly.

Aeron didn’t touch it, though. “It’s crawling with magic,” he said. “The kind of magic that a necromancer can’t touch when you’re as advanced as me.”

They were crouched behind a large, moss-covered tombstone in the center of a huge graveyard near London. Aeron had been teaching Harry how to raise Inferi without making the grave look disturbed, and then the Hogwarts owl had come.

“Right now, I can learn either type of magic?”

“Right. If you go to _that_ place, then your magic will align to follow what they teach. Align with a wand, first off.”

“Why is that bad?”

“A wand’s a pair of shackles, boy!” Aeron roared, hard enough that Harry flinched and nearly fell over on his backside. “Haven’t I told you that and told you that again?”

 _No,_ Harry thought, since they’d never talked specifically about wands before. But he kept silent and watched in a little wonder as Aeron ranted, his hands flying open and spittle jumping from his lips.

“The wand aligns with your magic and _tames_ it. It means that you can’t go high or deep anymore! You can’t sense the cold currents anymore! You can only do feats of destruction that have _names_! Incantations! You might wish for anything to happen while you don’t have a wand, and you might be able to do it, but the wand limits your imagination! It ties you down to only what other people can imagine and create spells for and put in books! Do you want that to happen?”

“No,” Harry said, softly, unhappily. Aeron had told him the story of how his parents had died, and he knew that his parents had gone to Hogwarts. Part of him wanted to walk the corridors they had walked, and talk to other people who knew them.

But he knew he would also miss the cold currents. He would miss the ability to look people in the eye as he passed them and know that he only had to lift a hand to terrify them.

He would go back to being a possible victim. Especially since Aeron had told him that first-years barely learned any spells except the safe ones, and focused a lot on disciplines like Herbology and Astronomy that were just knowledge, not power. Seventh-years and the professors and the people who weren’t part of the House he was Sorted into would try to bully him, just because they saw that as their right.

Harry straightened his back. “No,” he repeated. “I want to stay here and learn with you.”

Aeron grinned. “Good boy. Now, you’ll send back a refusal, but famous as you are, I doubt they’ll accept it. That means you’ll have to hide. I’ll teach you that magic today. Forget about raising Inferi. You’ll learn how to make them think you of less account than grave-dust.”

Harry leaned forwards, intrigued. Dudley still sometimes forgot that he shouldn’t chase Harry, and he did it in public so Harry couldn’t summon the dead. Hiding was useful. “How?”

*

“He was just here the other day!”

Harry, cloaked in the dust of the grave and a cold current, stood right next to the stairway and watched the wizards hunt around the Dursleys’ house for him. Aunt Petunia looked as if she would start sobbing if they didn’t go away soon, and there was a man with them who looked as if he would start stabbing people if he didn’t get answers. A little to Harry’s surprise, that wasn’t Dumbledore. It was a tall man in a black cloak and robes much finer than Aeron’s tattered ones.

“He cannot have gone far, Albus,” said a tall woman with glasses on her nose and a shape of a cat that hung in the air around her when Harry squinted. He supposed she was one of those people who could transform into animals that Aeron had told him about. That was about the only thing Harry regretted not being able to learn since he’d become a necromancer. “Not if he was here this morning.”

“Accidental magic and Apparition—” began a plump woman with a nice smile. Harry would have talked to her if she didn’t work for Hogwarts.

“You think Potter is _powerful_ enough to Apparate any distance?” The tall dark man asked it with a sneer.

Harry blinked. Huh. Aeron had told him that everyone in the wizarding world believed he was incredibly powerful because of his scar. It was kind of nice to run into someone who _didn’t_ believe that.

“Now, Severus,” said the Headmaster. He turned around and went over to talk to Aunt Petunia. Harry followed slowly. Aeron had warned him the disguise wasn’t perfect, but all the problems with it were ones that people normally couldn’t see through unless they could see the dead.

“I want to know why Harry refused to come to Hogwarts.” The Headmaster didn’t sound so kind and pleasant when he was alone with someone. “Did you prejudice him against magic? Did you tell him stories of the war?”

“We never told the freak _anything_ about magic!” Aunt Petunia had her arms folded and her nose up in the air the way Harry had seen her do with Mrs. Elbert who lived across the way and who Aunt Petunia thought didn’t keep her garden right. “We’re good, normal people, and we won’t have it in this house!”

“So he never did accidental magic?” the Headmaster asked.

Aunt Petunia swallowed. But Harry saw the way her eyes went into the corners, and he knew she would never tell anyone about the night Harry had summoned Richard and Elise. She was too afraid.

“He got up on the roof somehow once, when he was six or so,” she said slowly. “And he turned a teacher’s hair blue. And he grew his hair back overnight when—when he had a bad haircut.”

“That proves it, Albus, he can’t be a Squib,” the cat-woman said, although Harry thought she was talking to Severus more for some reason. “There’s _no reason_ he should have refused the letter.”

“Except his bloody arrogance,” Severus said. Harry shook his head a little. Aeron was right. Wizards were so arrogant themselves that they saw it everywhere, in everyone else.

“Severus,” the Headmaster said, but his voice was worried. He glanced at Aunt Petunia. “Why would he have refused us? The truth, this time,” he added, and Harry sucked in a soundless gasp as he felt the magic that settled into the kitchen. It made even the cold currents stop moving.

Aunt Petunia did try to resist him. She clenched her hands together and drummed her arms against her sides. But Harry knew that she would lose even before she said anything. “He-he doesn’t know about magic!” she finally gasped. “He’s always thought he was a freak! He might have thought it was a prank.”

The Headmaster dropped the magic and stared at Aunt Petunia hard enough that Harry liked him a little, even though he still didn’t have any intention of going to Hogwarts. “Are you listening to what you are saying, Petunia? Why would he not know about magic? You certainly did.”

Aunt Petunia flinched some more, but her voice was still spiteful when she said, “And you wouldn’t let me _come_ to Hogwarts. Why should he get to go? Why should he grow up knowing about his parents and magic?”

For some reason, Severus stepped forwards then like he was going to hurt Aunt Petunia, but the cat-woman got in his way. The plump woman wasn’t smiling anymore. “Do you think he ran away, Albus?” she whispered.

“I suppose he might have.” The Headmaster didn’t look happy. “We have to find him. He has magic, and that means he belongs at Hogwarts.”

Harry shook his head. Sure, he had magic, but he was a necromancer, not a wizard. And he thought he’d heard enough. Aeron had made an offer the other day that Harry had been thinking about, for Harry to come and live with him.

It was probably time. Harry hadn’t ever enjoyed being around the Dursleys, and now he thought people would be watching the house just in case he came back. He turned and walked out the door in the middle of his cloud of grave dirt.

There was nothing here that he wanted to keep.

*

“It is time to do something about that scar.”

Harry looked up. He and Aeron were in another abandoned house, one that was mostly nice on the inside. The dead knew all the secrets in the world as they drifted along on the cold currents that passed through iron and stone, and they didn’t mind being asked questions the way they did being summoned. “I know you said it had something of the dead in it. But what exactly is it?”

“A piece of that incompetent bastard’s soul.”

Harry started. He was used to the way that Aeron talked about Voldemort, but he hadn’t expected—he pressed his hand gingerly against the scar. “You think he split his soul to put a piece in me on _purpose_? But why? Why would he want to lose part of it?”

“Not on purpose. That’s why I said he was an incompetent bastard. He was trying to make something called a Horcrux.” Aeron made an impatient sound when Harry just stared at him. “Come _on_ , boy. It was in that book I gave you to read.”

“Well, I didn’t read it,” Harry muttered. He didn’t learn well from books. He learned by watching and doing. Practicing his summoning necromancy was a lot more fun than reading a boring old _book_.

“Next time, do.” Aeron stared into his eyes. “He was trying to murder you and then put his piece of soul into an object. Then he could be immortal as long as he wanted. He didn’t want to make the deal with death that we do, oh, not _him_. He was too afraid of it to seek it out and embrace it. So instead he flubbed up the situation good and proper. Left it to a _skilled_ necromancer to deal with.”

“How can I deal with it?”

“You’re going to _get_ good enough to deal with it, boy. You’re going to spend a lot of time studying soul magic, and being able to find the pieces of his soul that he stuffed into objects.”

“So you think this wasn’t the only piece of soul that he tried to put into a Horcrux?”

“‘Course not. It’s too small. He has others somewhere, and you’re going to find them and learn to control them, and then you can _really_ make the bastard dance to your tune.”

Aeron actually sounded angry. Harry blinked. “Why do you care so much about this? Why not just let me find it out on my own and handle it if I got it wrong?” That was the way that Aeron usually approached teaching Harry.

“Because he dared to do this to a _necromancer,_ boy.” Aeron’s eyes had a bright red shine when he turned his head far enough into the light coming through the broken window. “We’re the best of the best. We don’t suffer from incompetence, and we don’t get turned into Horcruxes. He’s going to _pay_ for what he did to you. What he dared to do to you.”

Harry thought it was kind of rich that Aeron was so upset about this now, when Harry hadn’t been a necromancer when he was actually _born_ and the Horcrux had happened when he was a baby, but he would take it. His relatives hadn’t cared about him. The wizards hadn’t cared about him enough to ever check on him before they sent his Hogwarts letter. Harry would take what he could get.


	2. Chapter 2

“Pull the object towards you as hard as you can.”

Harry knew that Aeron didn’t mean for him to simply pick up and pull the object—the locket he had found Ignotus knew where. (Aeron said Ignotus had been the name of the first necromancers, and it didn’t matter that it meant “unknown,” Harry wasn’t to worry about that, but he was to swear by that instead of God or Merlin. “Neither God nor Merlin has anything to do with us,” Aeron had said, and then cackled madly).

Harry extended his hand anyway, because sometimes the physical gestures helped him concentrate, and closed his eyes. For a second, he could feel the trembling pull between the locket’s chain and the soul in his scar. He could yank it towards him and it would brain him in the head, was what it would do.

And it would delight in it, too. Harry had never felt any hostility from the piece of soul embedded in his scar, but this piece of soul in the locket wanted to hurt him.

Especially now that he was going to separate it from its home.

Harry pulled, and went on pulling. When he gestured with his free hand that wasn’t extended towards the locket, he felt the dead rise up behind him and extend transparent arms. The cold currents swirled behind him, tugging with all the power of a riptide. He _was_ going to pull the piece of soul out of the locket, and he _was_ going to control it.

Voldemort wouldn’t have dared make Horcruxes if he had known his enemy was going to grow up to be a necromancer, was what Aeron had said.

In the end, after what felt like hours of tugging, the final moment of parting was sudden. Harry heard a scream that ripped at his ears, and the locket snapped open and vomited a streak of black that headed straight for Harry.

This was also a dangerous moment. Aeron had said the piece of soul could bond with the one in Harry’s scar and take him over—

But this wasn’t just anyone it was trying to take over. His name was Harry Potter, and he was a necromancer, and _he would win._

Harry held out his hands in front of him and curled his fingers in towards each other. There was a cold current there, the shifting and shimmering prison of the dead. When Harry flexed his two smallest fingers, the soul-shard from the locket landed inside the current and was bound there.

Harry held up the squirming thing and smiled at it for a second.

Then he plunged the soul-shard into the prison he had devised for it by breaking off a piece of a cold current and applying all the magic that Aeron had painstakingly taught him in the past six months to it. Now it was a cage of ice, with delicate bars, held in the world by Harry’s will. If he stopped willing it, the ice would melt and then pass out of the world utterly.

Taking with it whatever had been imprisoned in the cage.

Aeron hadn’t been sure that this piece of soul, broken off from its main piece so long ago, would be intelligent enough to understand that, but Harry had thought it would be. And he was right. The snarling, struggling thing froze as if it was made of ice itself the minute Harry plunged it into the cage. Then it settled down like a shivering wild animal and watched him with hatred. Harry couldn’t make out eyes or anything like that. He knew what it was doing thanks to his trained awareness of the dead.

Harry laughed softly. “Yes, I thought so,” he said, and then he turned back and considered the locket. It would make a good trophy, but he could also sell it and use the money to live well for a while. He was getting tired of abandoned houses, even if Aeron wasn’t.

*

Harry leaned back against the wall of his rented room in Knockturn Alley, his eyes closed. Aeron had discovered the locket on accident, wandering around London and feeling the pull of something that he had recognized as similar to the soul-shard in Harry. Harry didn’t think he could count on another accident to find the next one.

But he could reach out. And now he understood and recognized the throb of that dark power. The ice cage went everywhere with him, hidden. Harry knew there was another piece like it in London.

And tonight, for the first time, he had reached it. Not far away, in Diagon Alley. Harry smiled and lifted his hands.

His will slammed down on the cold currents, and the shades of his Potter grandparents appeared in front of him. Harry nodded at them. He needed them instead of his Muggle ones since they were more powerful, a trace of magic still clinging to them. “Go to Diagon Alley and retrieve the thing for me that feels like _this_.”

Fleamont and Euphemia blew around the ice cage, wavering back and forth. Sometimes they had faces, and sometimes they didn’t. The soul-shard from the locket cringed and cowered. Fleamont and Euphemia faded from sight.

Harry slumped back, although his mind traveled down the ropes of magic that bound him to his grandparents and traced them. He chuckled a little when he felt them slip into Gringotts. Maybe he should have suspected that. Gringotts had a reputation, Aeron had told him, as the best place to store any treasures.

It didn’t mean that most of the treasures inside it were Horcruxes, of course. Too bad. Harry could have destroyed them if they were and caused _so_ much trouble for the wizarding world he had firmly rejected.

He sat with his attention fixed on the shades, and guided them like puppets around the traps that might have inconvenienced them, since they were designed to tell the goblins when any sentient creature entered the vaults. However, the dead were only sentient, instead of silent observers recording everything they saw, if Harry leaned too hard on them and made them act with his own intelligence. They would need that for only one moment of this journey.

Eventually, his grandparents homed in on the Horcrux. There was a dragon outside the vault where it lay; Harry had learned to recognize that particular kind of flaring magical signature when Aeron took him to a dragon sanctuary to practice raising their bones. He waited to make Fleamont and Euphemia intelligent until they were past it, and past the thick wall of the vault.

Magical alarms filled his ears like a distant insect buzzing. Harry clenched his hand in front of himself and _jerked._ Instantly the arms of the dead had form and substance, and they picked up the vessel that the Horcrux was enclosed in and tossed it into a cold current.

Harry held it hovering behind the vault door, while releasing the forms of his grandparents. The minute the goblins opened the vault and charged in with axes and swords and probably other things that he couldn’t feel the shape of from here—the cold currents were only so sensitive—he zoomed the Horcrux out, and past the dragon, and up through the corridors. It avoided all the traps. They were designed to stop people, not objects that seemingly had a will of their own.

It landed next to him. Harry turned his head and opened his eyes. A golden cup gleamed at him, a badger on the side that made him smile dreamily. He would able to sell this for _so_ much money.

It was his thirteenth birthday.

*

“You’re ready for this.”

That was all Aeron had said before he dropped Harry off at the edge of a wide field that was concealed under a wave of magic. Harry stood with his head tilted back and his senses working on all sides of him.

He knew that a sheep had died here recently, and had been eaten by crows until removed by a Muggle vehicle. He knew that a man had once been stabbed here, but that was a faint imprint, long ago. It must have happened in a previous century. The cold currents swirled and howled in his ears, and he knew there were many artifacts capable of _causing_ death a short distance away, but given that that included wands and wards, he discarded the warning as too general and useless to matter.

Harry sought for the particular resonance that matched the one in his forehead instead. He knew that Aeron had found a Horcrux here, or he wouldn’t have bothered bringing Harry. Harry just needed to make sure that he could actually locate it.

 _There._ It was a small object, but then, none of them had been very big. Harry gave a thin smile. Aeron had reasoned that Voldemort must have created seven Horcruxes, or at least intended to, although he probably didn’t know about the one in Harry’s scar. By capturing this particular one, Harry would have four, counting the one that rode in him and would obey his will once he began working on it more strongly. And Voldemort had returned, at least in rumor, three years ago, at the end of what would have been Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, if he had chosen to be a wizard.

Harry knew wizards were seeking him all the time and all over the place, but they never looked in places that were poor or Dark enough. And he kept himself concealed within the cold currents and the grave dust now as he reached out.

This close, he didn’t even need the dead to pass through the wards of this manor. There might have been protections to keep them out, anyway, as there had not been at Gringotts. Harry only needed to touch the darkness of the Horcrux and convince it to come to him.

It took some time, swaying back and forth with the sentience in the soul-shard—stronger than most of them—debating silently with him. It didn’t want to come. Where it rested was nice and warm. It would find a victim one day and claim them.

Harry smiled a little at the arrogance of the dead. That was what the soul-shard was, without an active body. Necromancers could do little to influence living people, but the soul-shard fell into his domain.

_You say that you control me?_

_That is what I am saying. Or are you saying that you could control_ me _from within those wards that you’re hiding behind?_

It seemed this Horcrux had a hot temper. Harry opened his eyes to find a small black book lying at his feet. He knew better than to bend over and touch it, although the compulsion was almost overwhelming. Instead, he quietly conjured another of his ice cages, humming under his breath as he did so.

The soul-shard had time for a moment of blank surprise before it began to scream.

*

“You are ready to begin the Deeper Arts now.”

Harry bowed his head a little at Aeron’s tone, thrilled. Aeron had always spoken of the Deeper Arts with reverence, and also told Harry that he was far too young to study them. These were the arts that would bring Harry fully into contact with the mysteries of the soul, and let him control his own and venture out of his body into the world of the dead. He could raise the ancient dead, infuse Inferi with a stronger life, force those who were not related to him to speak the truth.

And he would wield Voldemort like a puppet before he was done.

“You have four of the soul-shards with you,” Aeron said. “Even if he made seven, you have more than half.” He paused and leaned forwards, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight. They were out in another field where ancient battle-dead had been buried and made the environment congenial for necromancers. His fingers brushed the scar on Harry’s forehead.

“But you do not yet have complete control of _this_ one,” Aeron breathed.

Harry nodded, his eyes locked on Aeron. “What do I have to do?”

Aeron stepped back. They were in yet another rented room in Knockturn Alley; Harry hadn’t managed to persuade Aeron to take shelter with him inside permanently, but at least now he spent most nights out of the wet. The room was larger than the ones Harry had rented in the past, dusty, and quiet. Since the bed, a table, and one chair were the only pieces of furniture, the bare floor was large enough to have plenty of sitting space.

“Assume the Posture for the Calling of the Ancestors.”

Harry tucked his legs beneath him and sat, never taking his eyes from Aeron’s face. Aeron closed his own eyes and began to hum. His body swayed gently back and forth. Harry’s eyes followed him, and then he realized that he was hovering above his body. He was seeing his own shoulders and the fall of his wild hair.

For the first time, Harry looked up and saw the cold currents without needing a shade or a soul-shard to mark their position for him.

It was beautiful. The whole world was cut with the shining streams of dark blue and silver that turned this way and that, binding the living and the dead. Harry reached out, and felt the current of the nearest one pull on him. He could follow that, and he would be a hundred miles away by morning.

“Concentrate.”

Aeron’s voice sang from a hundred different directions around him. Harry snapped his eyes front and center, and did focus. Aeron had told him again and again how many necromancers got lost during astral travel. Harry was not going to be one of them.

He had come a long way from the weak, foolish child who would have turned into a weak, foolish wizard without even knowing that mastery of the dead was _possible_.

Aeron said, “Look down on your body. Locate the soul-shard and force it to do what you want.”

Harry did just that, fastening his eyes on the twisting sphere of his body. He was alive, and looked at it from this perspective, his body was a wavering, leaping mass of colors, all darting out and then back into the rough boundaries of the sphere like tongues of fire retreating continually inwards. In the center of his forehead lay the soul-shard, a motionless, drifting blob without any coruscating colors of its own.

“I found it,” he breathed.

“Now you will pick it up and crush it within your fist.”

“But why destroy one of the Horcruxes?”

“You have to merge the one inside you with your own magic. You cannot do this with the others, unless you absorb them into your body as well. You have to master it, or it will master you. The only reason it has not so far is because it was born of wizard magic, and you are a necromancer.”

Harry nodded his understanding and reached out. The Horcrux remained motionless as he picked it up, although Harry felt a sharper, colder sensation, as if he had stepped into one of the currents after all. He held it for a moment, looked towards Aeron for reassurance—and saw nothing but more fire—and then crushed it.

There was a keening shriek that picked up and swept the world of the dead like a northern wind. Harry staggered back, eyes wide, shoulders hunched against the shard’s mindless fury, and Aeron barked at him like a sheepdog.

“Master it or it will master you!”

And now Harry knew what he meant. Brought fully into the necromancy, the shard awoke and fought with him. Harry could feel tendrils of purpose curling around his own soul, trying to yank it apart and feed on it the way the shades he summoned sometimes tried.

Harry narrowed his eyes. _Oh, no, you don’t._ He fought back, lifting his power and throwing it against the shard like a ram. The shard’s defenses broke apart; Harry thought he felt shock, thin and wounding. Then he swept in and seized control of the shard, crushing it as Aeron had told him.

In seconds, another world bloomed around him, blue and black and cut with crazy colors of that spiritual fire.

Harry could have lost himself in the wonders that he could see now: wide blue meadows, starry skies with constellations that were nothing like the ones Aeron had taught him to recognize, white curtains of billowing vapor that carried the shrieks of the dead with them. But he held the shard in his hand, and he turned and reached out to the ones that had accompanied him in ice cages for months or years now.

Locket, book, cup. They trembled, but they obeyed. They hated him, but they were his. Harry shaped them into the same formless mass that he held in the hand that cradled the original shard. When he was done, his hands dripped and glittered with what looked like molten rubies.

“Use them, you fool boy!”

Harry didn’t get distracted by the shout, this time, or how the wonders around him grew wilder and wilder with every moment: deep purple mountain glens, paths of gold and blue that led away into the void, a smell of juniper tinted with hemlock. He turned the rubies into a harness. Aeron had said he would know the right shape. And he did: Harry envisioned a bit and sharp spikes sticking out from it, and smiled when the bridle flowed into being.

“Now fling it.”

Harry turned his head. The world of the dead and the living surrounded him, distances melting away and assuming the right proportions that had nothing to do with the distances that occupied the world of only the living. Voldemort was in a house of some kind with white blocks of fire for the walls, exhorting his followers. Harry could see another Horcrux curled close at his feet. So he _had_ made seven.

It didn’t matter. Harry reached out and curled the bridle around Voldemort’s head and neck, making sure to settle the bit firmly into his mouth.

The struggle that took place then seized Harry and shook him furiously back and forth, as if he was a rat in a hawk’s talons. He was dying, he was living, he was facing down Voldemort’s fury and fear in motionless silence. He was all those things at once, and he would have lost if he wasn’t a necromancer and used to working with conflicting sensations.

Voldemort might have pretended to be a necromancer in his time, if the Ministry propaganda was true, but he didn’t know what to do when he was facing a real one.

The bridle sank into Voldemort’s skin, and then his brain, and then his soul. The fight stopped abruptly. Harry reached out and sent an impulse trailing along the bridle, and Voldemort obeyed him, crumpling to the floor.

The fires that marked his followers surged up and jumped around, apparently waving their arms and yelling. Harry snorted to himself and kept working his hands and control. Voldemort stood up.

The followers backed off and probably studied him worriedly, although Harry could hear nothing of human words or see their facial expressions in this world. He made Voldemort speak, however.

“I am well. I had a vision.”

He waited until the swirling gestures that indicated questions in the followers died down, and then had Voldemort speak again, making his voice a low, impressive hiss. Harry found talking to snakes less interesting than talking to the dead, but he knew that it was the other way around for Voldemort.

“I know how we can defeat Dumbledore.”

From there, Harry laid out the entire plan that he’d come up with, one that would knock wizards down to a lower peg without getting rid of all of them—places like Knockturn Alley and Gringotts were useful, Harry had found—and bring necromancers back to prominence in the world. He could hear Aeron cackling behind him the entire time, but he ignored that. Then he loosened the bridle a little and withdrew. Voldemort would still do what Harry had told him, but Harry wouldn’t have to command his every word, or do something as dangerous as having him respond to people that Harry could neither hear nor see.

Harry opened his eyes to find himself resting with his cheek on the floor, beneath the glow of a lamp. He sat up slowly, and blinked at the melting ice cages before he remembered. Of course. Those Horcruxes were gone. They no longer existed in any separate form.

And neither did his.

Harry cupped his hand in front of him and watched as the shadow of a dead hand clasped it. He let his breath out with a whoosh. Aeron had reassured him that losing the soul-shard in his head wouldn’t destroy his magic, but Harry hadn’t been certain until now.

“You have made things easier,” said Aeron, and he grinned between cracked and broken teeth. Apparently how to take care of them was a secret that he’d never asked the dead. “We have brethren who will want to meet you.”

Harry gave him a contained smile. Honestly, fame among wizards or fame among necromancers, it was all the same to him.

What mattered most to him was that he no longer had that piece of soul in his head, and he would finally be able to stop running.

*

The _Daily Prophet_ blared the interview Voldemort had given them in letters so bright and high that even walking past the rattling, torn papers on the street let Harry see it. He chuckled to himself and looked innocently away so that he could watch the wizards on the street in Diagon Alley. He didn’t spend as much time here as he did in Knockturn, but given the grave-dirt disguise that hid him, he still wasn’t worried about being recognized.

Wizards were halting to talk to each other in shocked voices, their heads bowed and their fingers twitching on the handles of their baskets and satchels and carts. Almost no one had believed Voldemort was really back, Harry knew. Dumbledore was the only one who claimed to have proof, and he wouldn’t share what that proof really was.

Harry knew, because the dead knew. Dumbledore had hidden the Philosopher’s Stone at Hogwarts. He’d hardly advertise that he’d had it and then lost it.

Harry stole an apple with a casual hand from an outdoor cart and then leaned against a wall so that he could listen to the nearest conversation.

“But…would we _really_ be able to call back the dead? I don’t understand how he can make promises like that.”

“But why would he say that if it’s not true?”

“Because he’s _You-Know-Who_!”

“I mean, he was rather known for keeping promises in the first war, wasn’t he?”

“What, ‘I’m going to murder your entire family’ promises?”

Harry chuckled and moved on. Of course Voldemort wouldn’t be able to call the dead back to life in the way that the people on the street around him were dreaming of: as if they had never died. But with the help of necromancers who would work with Voldemort, he could manage animated Inferi with the right souls, charmed against decomposition. And the necromancers like Harry could keep an eye on them and make sure that the dead “died” again if someone got too curious or too rebellious or started displaying any other undesirable trait.

It really made _so_ much sense.

Harry flicked the apple core away and vanished into the dust again.

*

“You’ve achieved things I never thought you could achieve.”

Harry grinned at Aeron. They were standing in a back anteroom off the Wizengamot, listening to Voldemort make one of his speeches—one of those dictated entirely by Harry’s control of his Horcruxes, of course. At the moment, Voldemort was speaking in response to one of the few Wizengamot members who still wanted to arrest him, and he was arguing in favor of necromancy being made legal as soon as possible.

“If it can give us these miracles,” he was saying, talking about the emotional return of the dead from the first war, supposedly ones he’d raised, “who are we to say that we should ban it?”

Dumbledore was arguing against him still in the streets, but he was mostly losing. Aeron thought Dumbledore might vanish soon and go on the run with the remnants of his vigilante group, the Order of the Phoenix. Harry thought that was likely, but he wasn’t terribly bothered by it. The dead knew where everyone was, after all, if you asked them the right way.

And Voldemort killing his more violent followers without pity and offering huge amounts of money to the Wizengamot, the Ministry, and the survivors of the first war _did_ have such a soothing influence.

“You realize there’s a chance that someone will recognize you when we walk into the chamber?” Aeron went on in a more somber voice.

Harry grinned again. He had longer, thicker dark hair than he’d ever had in his life; something about the soul-shard in his scar had prevented it from growing before this, holding it unchanging. His scar was gone completely. He had green eyes that he didn’t need glasses for. Having contact with the dead also meant they could tell you about some of the rarer Potions ingredients.

“I know. But I don’t look much like either of my parents anymore, and everyone except Dumbledore and his followers thinks I’m dead, anyway. And when we tell them that you’re my grandfather…”

“ _Great-_ grandfather. I didn’t bump around the world for nearly one hundred years to have a grandson as young as you.”

Harry laughed. “But you taught me what I needed to know. And that’s a gift worth more than any sire could ever have given me.”

Aeron squinted at him. “I come from a lineage of necromancers. I knew what I wanted. I can’t believe that you don’t sometimes regret giving up the chance to follow your own lineage.”

“Be a wizard, you mean? No. We know well enough from those shades that swept through Hogwarts how Dumbledore would have used me. Being a weapon doesn’t appeal to me.”

“If you could have been a wizard without that?”

“But I wouldn’t have been the same person, then. It was even the soul-shard that made you want to train me to be a necromancer. I do owe everything I am to that.”

Aeron turned his head and stared hard at the far wall of the anteroom. “It was that. But now it’s something else.”

It was as close as Aeron would ever come to saying words that remained unspoken between them. Harry nodded at him. “I know. But let’s not get all maudlin, _Great_ -Grandfather. Let’s go into that chamber and start convincing the Wizengamot that we can bring all their dead loved ones back to life and we live in a world of miracles now.”

Aeron cackled, the familiar, comforting sound that had twined through so much of Harry’s life. “And you’re going to convince them that it’s reality. Clever of you to figure out a way to channel Voldemort’s power through that bridle so that we can use his magic to perform our own necromancy.”

“Cleverness could be my middle name if we hadn’t already decided on something else.”

Voldemort’s voice soared up. “…And it is a privilege to introduce the two necromancers responsible for so many of these miracles to the Wizengamot. Aeron Luthan and his great-grandson, Harrison Thanatos Luthan!”

“Just a little grandiose, though,” Harry whispered under his breath as they walked into public view.

“We rule the British wizarding world, boy. We can afford to be grandiose.”

**The End.**


End file.
